Welcome back to the Love Your Story podcast. Today is Halloween and so it’s appropriate I bring to you a story steeped in the bizarre and spooky. Today we speak of zombies. Not in theory, but it reality. Join me for a trip to Haiti and a dive into voodoo, magic, and the bizarre reality of real life (the word is used lightly) zombies.
In February of 1974, Wade Davis, the future Harvard Scientist who would journey into the secret societies of Haitian Voodoo, zombies and magic, had his first meeting with the man who would send him on this quest to discover the plants used in creating the drugs that turned people into Zombies.
Today’s podcast includes part of Wade’s story from his book The Serpent and the Rainbow and his astonishing journey into the secret societies of Haitian voodoo, as well as an interview with Lynne McNeill, Associate Folklore professor at Utah State University, who went to Haiti with a film crew to delve into the Zombie stories, and the experiences she had there is past year. Happy Halloween, you won’t want to miss this bizarre look into the realm of zombies, possession, and first-hand experiences and discussions Lynne had with priest and priestess of the Voodoo religion.
Let’s jump right into Wade Davis’s story that starts in 1974….At this point in his life, he was just a student, anxious and restless to explore. The Amazon was his first choice and so he approached the venerable professor Richard Evans Schultes in the Department of Anthropology for his advice. As he slipped onto the 4th floor of Harvard’s Botanical Museum and the office of Professor Schultes, he was met with herbarium cases and photos of professor Schultes in exotic locales. The advice Schultes gave was sparse, so without plans and just enough money to support himself for a year, Davis headed to Colombia. Schultes turned out to be a catalyst of adventure, but Davis was on his own to find his way. This student of anthropology embarked onto what would be only his first adventure in exotic places where his life was often at risk due to jungles and rainforests, foreign and wild cultures, lack of supplies and uncharted territory as he sought to collect plants. He had advised himself before embarking on this journey to “risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.” This first expedition became but an episode in an ethnobotanical apprenticeship that took him throughout much of western South American. He earned his degree in anthropology in 1977. Following a two-year hiatus from the tropics, Davis returned to Harvard as one of Professor Schultes’s graduate students. Ethnobotany meant searching for plants with medicinal properties, and collecting the plants was only part of the exploration. Learning from the Indians and natives of the areas they explored were key to understanding how the plants were used. Schultes had spent 13 years in the Amazon because he believed that the Indian knowledge of medicinal plants could offer vital new drugs for the entire world. He identified over 1800 plants of medical potential in the northwest Amazon alone and he knew that thousands more remained. These were the plants he sent his students out to find.
Late on a Monday afternoon early in 1982 Schultes’s secretary called Davis and asked him to come into the office. “I’ve got something for you,” Schultes said. “It could be intriguing.” He handed him the New York address of Dr. Nathan Kline, psychiatrist, and pioneer in the field of psychopharmacology – the study of the actions of drugs on the mind. Kline was not a small player in the field of mental disorders and chemical imbalances rectified by drugs. His research lowered the number of patients at American psychiatric institutions from over half a million in the 50’s to 120,000 in the 80’s. He was no small player and this was not a trip to be taken lightly.
It turned out that Davis was being sent to the...
